Decadent Webster: Swinburne, Symonds and the Poet of ‘dreadful stuff’

Abstract According to John Addington Symonds's introduction for the Mermaid Series edition of the plays of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur (1888), Webster excelled at depicting the ‘dreadful depths in human nature’. The fin-de-siècle fascination with humanity's ‘dreadful depths’ is well-known, and the word ‘dreadful’ has long been synonymous with the late Victorian urban concoction of sexual delight and danger. What Symonds terms the ‘dreadful stuff’ of Webster's tragedies The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1614) derived from the criminal history of the Italian Renaissance, of which Symonds was the pre-eminent nineteenth-century historian. Symonds and the leading Victorian critic of Elizabethan drama, Algernon Charles Swinburne, both took Webster as the subject of their earliest dramatic criticism and returned frequently to the ‘dreadful stuff’ of these two plays. This article traces the roots and implications of that preoccupation, arguing that the ‘dreadful stuff’ of Webster's Italian tragedies was integral to these writers’ sexual as well as critical psychologies. For Swinburne, the suffering of Webster's Duchess presented a study in the connoisseurship of pain and the power of erotic pathos, while for Symonds the gender-ambiguous ‘dreadful daring’ of Vittoria Accoramboni in the trial scene of The White Devil was rapturously arousing. The article underscores the importance of Webster's tragedies in creating a space in the late nineteenth century for critical and erotic speculations about art, pain and desire.